


Kingsbridge

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Drabble, Gen, you can pry working class!graves from my cold dead hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 12:26:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10741671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: It's really very difficult to get enough out of  Legilimency to impersonate someone convincingly. Most habits are unconscious, most people aren't /thinking/ about how they present themselves all the time.Percival Graves, on the other hand...





	Kingsbridge

Fifteen years ago, Percival Graves, then 22 years old, had nearly finished erasing everything which might have saved him at 37.

When he first felt Grindelwald crack open his skull, separating out its contents like an egg, white from yolk from the way his jacket was newly-purchased, and scrupulously clean, but purchased second-hand and faintly threadbare  on his first day at Ilvermorny, Graves had tried to lie. Not to Grindelwald, but to himself, a mantra of  _ coffee with two sugars from that little place on 4th, can’t stand the taste of it otherwise and lunch meetings with Serafina every Tuesday and everyone says how strange it is that I write left-handed but cast with my right, never called Goldstein anything but ‘you, girl’, never show up to the office before 9. _ He fell to feverishly concocting treasured memories and old acquaintances, cutting himself up and rearranging himself in the grey hours in between Grindelwald’s visits. After three days, the other man had cupped his cheek in one dry, white hand and tutted gently. 

“Mr Graves,” he murmured “We are better than that, you and I.” He seemed disappointed, tapping at Graves’s temple with his wand before brutally screwing himself inside.

It hurt, afterwards. Very much.

There were flaws with  Legilimency, of course, the inherent paradox of trying to know a man’s habits, his tics and flaws well enough to  _ be _ him when, more likely than not, he didn’t know them all himself. There would be something you missed, some unconscious quirk of phrasing, some tell, some  _ something _ ; the last traces of a lilting nasality at the back of man’s voice, an over-familiarity with the Bronx that would seem jarring in a man of his supposed station.

But then Percival Graves had washed himself clean of Kingsbridge fifteen years ago, charmed the lingering Irish out of his throat, copied walks and suits until he no longer recognized himself as a man who had  _ ever _ stretched one jacket over three winters in half-inch increments that just barely kept pace with his growing limbs. Nobody knew the man he  _ was _ , only the one he’d made. The one he’d catalogued so thoroughly to be  _ sure _ he’d done it  _ right _ , that  the whole of himself could be lifted up to the light for careful and studied perusal by a man with the right set of tools.

The irony was choking.

In the grey dark, in an unfamiliar voice he hadn’t heard in more than a decade, rolling vowels clotted with disuse, Percival Graves swore.

**Author's Note:**

> Kingsbridge is one of historically Irish immigrant neighborhoods in the Bronx.


End file.
